[Tenoke]

That's not really true. It was a real trend on which Facebook jumped on[0] but yes their involvement overshadowed that. And at any rate clearly the poster here used it in a general sense of a VR Environment rather than meaning Facebook's specific implementation.

0. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

[jakear]

Same holds for HN discussion in particular. It's interesting to look back to what "metaverse" meant to HN in 2018-2020: https://jacksonkearl.github.io/HackerTrends/?query=%22metave... (shameless plug for my project)